After several years of austerity and minimal pay rises, two pay cap-breaking pay offers have come at once. A three year offer for NHS staff and a two year offer for those covered by the Local Government National Joint Council (NJC).
The latter is going to felt by schools across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as the NJC is the national pay system for schools – indeed, the NJC covers more than 1.5 million local government and school workers.
The deal will be complex so schools will need to consider it in detail. The very basics are a minimum pay increase of just over four per cent over the two years for support staff currently earning more than £20,000, with increasing amounts for lower paid staff – all wrapped up with a new national pay spine.
With most school support staff at the bottom end of the NJC scale, this could mean significant additional costs for school budgets.
But it is worth noting that a chunk of the 16 per cent increase for staff at the very bottom of the scale is actually necessary to meet the requirements of the government’s minimum wage.
Unlike the NHS pay offer, the government hasn’t yet identified any additional money to fund these increases. Last summer when negotiations were beginning to firm up, I contacted the Department for Education (DfE) to discuss the potential impact and offered to meet with them to discuss it. I was surprised at their insouciance.
They said they were aware of the negotiations and were modelling possible rises into cost pressures on schools, but they showed no desire to meet. When a concrete pay offer came out just before Christmas I again contacted the DfE and offered to meet, but again no avail.
I was told that as support staff pay is devolved to local employers the DfE wouldn’t even be saying anything about it to schools. My gast was truly flabbered.
A couple of multi-academy trusts have muttered about not paying the award, but it is surely morally wrong that schools, which in recent years have happily implemented miniscule pay awards, go wobbly when they are asked to implement a half-decent pay deal (note inflation is still around three per cent).
Also, it is not as easy as just saying “that’s it we are ending national pay”. Staff have contractual rights, are covered by recognition agreements, TUPE and customs and practice. Employers would have to set up additional local bargaining arrangements, comply with minimum wage legislation and also not get tangled up with potential equal pay problems that could arise – which we would pursue if employers tried to get out of national pay.
Add in the potential for industrial action and employers would be wise not to do anything rash.
UNISON wants to work with employers to implement the agreement and will begin by holding a meeting for our lead negotiators and representatives from the larger multi-academy trusts.
We will lead them through the new proposals and how the new pay spine might work in their schools. We will subsequently roll this advice out to our local negotiators and smaller academy trusts.
We are not insensitive to the funding challenges that schools face, but it is also our job to make sure that workers earn a decent wage. Our sister unions will also be hoping for a decent increase out of the forthcoming School Teachers’ Review Body pay review report.
What we all need to do – employers, unions, parents and the wider community – is to unite to persuade the government to fund these forthcoming rises and other costs that are pressing down on school budgets.
The government knows there is a problem and we need to keep it in the forefront of the political agenda.
You can join us in the campaign via the School Cuts Coalition website (see below).
- Jon Richards is national secretary for education at UNISON.
Further information
- UNISON: www.unison.org.uk/education
- The School Cuts campaign website: https://schoolcuts.org.uk